In a data center environment, edges devices are used to route communications between servers that may host hundreds of virtual machines. The edge devices often have small hardware forwarding tables and the number of routes that each switch needs to maintain may exceed the capacity of the switch's hardware forwarding table. The selection of routes to program in the hardware forwarding table and utilization of the table is important to performance and scalability in data center networks and other networks wherein the hardware forwarding table is limited in size.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.